…

2000

In an apparently-empty space, thousands of small ball-bearings drip gently from overhead tracks, bouncing around and puddling in shifting formations. This constant yet barely visible movement establishes a zone of uncertainty, elusiveness, and slight hazard, and also of play.

The project arose from an invitation to develop new work based on artefacts
from the collection of the Japanese Canadian Cultural Centre in Toronto.
The conceptual origin of ... was a small quantity of pachinko balls in
this collection, which were remarkable precisely because they were so
innocuous. As unassuming artefacts of a game of chance, they not only
were tokens of everyday compulsions, but also had the potential to represent
a slipping-away of things. Translating the pachinko balls into the mechanical
efficiency of ball-bearings and further re-imagining them as a sort of
elemental force, the installation embodies a state of chance and passage
by creating a space of slippage, of fluidity, and of forgetting rather
than remembering.